Maria Ruggiero: Public health educator zeroes in on prevention

TEWKSBURY -- Growing up in a traditional Italian family, the instruction Maria Ruggiero received when it came to drugs and alcohol was, "You don't do it because it's wrong and I said so."

For decades, that was the model of school-based campaigns like "Just Say No" and D.A.R.E. But in the face of research showing the impotence of that approach, public health officials are changing their tactics when speaking to adolescents. In Greater Lowell, Ruggiero and a team of local public health officials are leading the charge.

"Instead of telling them 'No, don't do this,' educate them about what it does and why they shouldn't do it, in the hopes that in five to 10 years they're not part of that addicted group," she said.

Sitting in the roll call room of the Tewksbury Police Department, out of which she is based, Ruggiero repeatedly points out that she is just one of dozens of people in the region who are dedicated to finding public health solutions to addiction.

But Ruggiero has been tackling the opioid epidemic in particular longer than most, and her own career path shows how much attitudes toward addiction have changed in less than a decade.

In 2008, Ruggiero was working with the Lowell Health Department when the city's police department applied for and received a grant to study opioid use. They examined a decade's worth of death certificates in the city, pulling out the ones linked to opioids as they tried to learn the scope of the problem.

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"It kind of snowballed from there because as we got into it and we started to work, especially on overdose and harm reduction, we really started to understand the depth of the epidemic," she said.

After working with the Lowell team that headed the regional opioid grant, Ruggiero took up an office in the Tewksbury Police Department and now oversees another regional grant focused on substance abuse prevention of all kinds.

Not that long ago, police thought about addiction as a crime. But Ruggiero said that Tewksbury officers, and those in the surrounding communities, have really bought into the notion that it is a public health crisis and can't be solved by incarceration.

Much of Ruggiero's job involves overcoming the stigma that surrounds drugs and addiction.

The shame associated with the disease keeps many people silent on the issue, and Ruggiero and others have found that some parents and school districts are resistant to hosting educational programs that address the topic in very specific, personal ways.

"Getting into the classrooms to do prevention education is really hard," Ruggiero said. "We haven't done enough of it yet."

Some of the concern is easy to understand. Parents worry that their children are too young to be part of such discussions, and that they may actually learn about drugs before they otherwise would.

But Ruggiero argues that the education needs to start in middle and even elementary school and that the programs Greater Lowell public health officials are running are adapted for the age group.

There seems to be a transformation in kids between elementary and middle school, she said, and that is often the time they start experimenting.

And even if schools and parents aren't talking about drugs directly, they should be starting conversations about handling stress and maintaining mental health because those problems are tied closely to substance abuse later in life.

"What we're trying to do, and what the state is trying to do, is address all these elements as a comprehensive, whole picture," Ruggiero said.

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